Tuesday, 5 February 2013

Horses for courses

Just as Hans Werner Henze, citing among other things the suffocating hegemony of the Darmstadt aesthetic, abandoned Germany for Italy, Maderna left Italy in 1963 to take up residency in Darmstadt and German citizenship. There the parallels end, for Maderna arrived in Darmstadt at a time when Cagean experimentalism was a far greater influence on European serialist thought than the post-Webern legacy commonly misrepresented as imposing doctrinal discipline on all conceivable compositional parameters. Whether it is due to this or the slipperiest of versatile idioms, his output has largely fallen through the historiographical cracks except for a small number of works including the late opera of sorts Satyricon, which works well both as a staged piece and in concert.

The Klangforum Wien performed Satyricon in concert at the Theater an der Wien and I wrote about it for Bachtrack. Completely different but no less lurid, surreal and of its time is the Fellini take on Petronius: